Ajit Singh obituary
The economist Ajit Singh, who has died aged 74, was a pioneer in the analysis of takeovers and the structure of the modern business enterprise. He also devised the first operational definition of de-industrialisation in advanced economies and was a leading voice in the debate over the dynamics of industrialisation and financial markets in the developing world.
Singh's work on corporate behaviour resulted in two major publications, Growth Profitability and Valuation (1968, co-authored with Geoffrey Whittington) and Takeovers: Their Relevance to the Stock Market and the Theory of the Firm (1972). In these two books Singh tested the work of the Cambridge economist Robin Marris, who, developing research on corporate structure in the 1930s by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, had argued that the role of disciplining corporate managers and of aligning their decision-making with the welfare of shareholders would be played by the stock market alone: in other words, that the market will ensure efficiency by selecting the fittest companies for survival.
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